Kaleidoscope has proved most helpful, Sternberg said, in helping admissions officers choose among the upper middle group of applicants. He noted that the mean SAT scores of the incoming freshman class at Tufts have improved every year since Kaleidoscope was introduced, and so has student body diversity. In the first year of its implementation, for the Class of 2011, Tufts admitted 30 percent more African Americans and 15 percent more Latinos than the year before. Today, people of color represent about 26 percent of the undergraduate student body of 5,000.

Melinda Burns reviews Robert Sternberg’s book, College Admissions for the 21st Century.

As Burns explains, Kaleidoscope is an extra section on the Tufts college application, a voluntary take-home test that about two-thirds of prospective students elect to complete. It measures creativity and critical thinking skills in addition to grades (which can be inflated) and standardized test scores (which have a strong class bias).

The reality is that America has a long history of welcoming immigrants who will never be able to check that white box on the census, and unfortunately that means America also has a long history of discrimination against those people regardless of their status in the country.

So says Christian Lander, white Canadian American and the dude behind Stuff White People Like in his CNN.com opinion piece How we became white people.

The differences in the performance of more and less equal countries are very large. Rather than things being just a bit worse in more unequal countries, they are very much worse. More unequal countries have three times the rates of violence, of infant mortality and of mental illness. Their teenage birth rates are six times as high, and rates of imprisonment are eight times higher.

From Hey, America: It’s Time to Redefine the “Good Life” on Alternet.org.

The United States’ income inequality is comparable to that of Russia and Mexico. In fact, we’re the only rich nation in which it has become worse since 1980.

On the one hand, the ghetto is a part of a city historically defined by race and class. On the other hand, being ghetto refers to a set of tastes that emerged as poor people of color developed fashion and cultural artifacts that proudly expressed their identity. Just as physical spaces and tastes are organized around and shaped by race and class, so too are digital environments.

From “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” by danah boyd. [Draft; PDF file]

Verdicts about high-pitched movies from black viewers and public figures are usually swift and decisive — “Do the Right Thing,” “The Color Purple,” and the recent Robert Downey Jr. performance in “Tropic Thunder” come to mind. But that’s not what happened this time out. That’s partly because the embrace of “Precious” by the white film establishment has been a bit disorienting for black folk, even off-putting. But it’s also because the tough stuff in “Precious,” whether you like the movie or not, is striking chords of recognition for many black people that are making them not angry or enthusiastic, but uncertain. That’s new territory.

Black folks want to see more representations of “us” on screen. The question is, which “us” gets to be most visible? Also from the piece:

Nonetheless, Wright decries the movie for its lack of what he calls “achiever values.” And here we get into the thorny issue of class. For black people that means not solely money and education, but a concern about how we are being represented in public. How blacks are represented in movies always galvanizes such concern, and “Precious” is no exception.

[Via Faboomama's Friendfeed]

Also see: To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic’ from the New York Times (log-in may be required)

The northeast will always be home to me. That’s where I grew up. But the South is Grandmama House.¹

Me in an old conversation with JT. Why yes, I did just quote myself in a blog post.

As a kid, Down South was the land of Kountry Folk, people like loud-ass, country-ass, twangy-talking Tina and her quieter, yet rougher-in-that-country-ass-way brother (Donald maybe?) who visited their auntie (a neighbor of mine) a couple of summers.

Down South was the land from which my people came — and got the fuck out of (thank the good Lord Sweet Jesus) — because of barking dogs, and fire hoses, and job discrimination, and Jim Crow, and that damned n-word. Later, the South was the land where I was sentenced to spend boring-ass (I repeat: Boring. Ass.) summers counting the pickup trucks rolling down York Street as penance for being a teenager.

So <ebonics>why in da hey-ull²</ebonics> has my family of (mostly) native New Yorkers migrated to the South?³ And why did my Southern grandparents migrate north and then return south, to their hometowns (or nearby)?

I have lived here — first in South Carolina and now in Georgia — for ten years. That don’t even sound right to my ears. Neither does this country-ass, twangy-talking voice I hear coming out of my own mouth. But there it is and here I am in a place I once viewed with equal parts fear and suspicion. I still give the South the side eye on occasion, but it’s tempered by the kind of nuanced understanding that only comes from living here and adopting a bit of that Southern pose.

The South is a region with a complex history and a truck-bed’s worth of contradictions. It’s the Bible Belt. And yet strip clubs and adult novelty shops are really visible, and seemingly everywhere. The South had slavery, a war to keep it, and almost a century of de jure racial segregation. But it also had (and has) a deep level of intimacy, familiarity and contact between blacks and whites. I think folks here align as often along class lines as they do along racial lines. In most northern cities, race is primary.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the South does not feel like “home.” You will never, ever, ever hear claim the South⁴ because I’m from Strong Island, son!!!!⁵ — but, as I told JT, it does feel like grandma’s house.

When people complain about a Web 2.0 app or service, the response is often “build it yourself.” The problem is that most of us in the world can’t afford to start up a company, because the jobs that pay the bills take up too much time. There’s a luxury in having enough money put away that you can start a company, and a luxury in being able to start one while you keep a day job that doesn’t take up too much time and energy on top of family.

I was reminded of this Christmas day when showing my cousin a camera phone photo that I captured and uploaded from a beach in Anguilla on my brand new iPod Touch. I wasn’t trying to show off as much as I was trying to share a beautiful photo.

Her comment — something about “rich people” and I ain’t rich — stung. But it reminded me just how well-off I actually am compared to most Americans in general, and most Black Americans in particular.

How does this translate to tech? Part of creating relevant tools is understanding the context in which they will be used and the ways in which people may bend them to suit their circumstances. Money is a big factor in most peoples’ circumstances. It’s the difference between the free phone and a quad-band GSM smartphone with a camera, and WiFi capabilities. It’s the difference between an entry-level Windows machine and anything Apple. It’s having the internet on your phone and not. In other words, it’s everything. And we need to be careful not to lose sight of this.